Water main breaks in Pottstown, Phoenixville highlight aging infrastructure issues

A water main break that forced the evacuation of Schuylkill Elementary School students Wednesday is just the latest example of how winter’s shifting temperatures can play havoc with the aging infrastructure beneath Pennsylvania’s older towns.

Tuesday night, Pottstown Public Works Director Doug Yerger was telling the Borough Authority Board that he may need emergency authorization to replace an 82-year-old, 12-inch water main that keeps springing leaks along the same stretch of pipe beneath Beech Street.

“We’ve fixed two breaks in two weeks and last week we had a boil water notice and it keeps springing new leaks,” Yerger said.

Similarly, the Schuylkill Township break, which cut off water to the school Wednesday morning and was located on St. John’s Circle at Norris Street, was also not the first.

It first failed around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, according to Donna Alston, a spokeswoman with Aqua Pennsylvania. Alston said there were two initial fixes for the main but it kept breaking open anew.

“Sometimes when you restore water to the main it will break,” Alston said Wednesday afternoon. “We’re repairing the third of what we hope will only be three breaks.”

Health rules dictated that the loss of water meant the elementary school had to be evacuated. Luckily students at Phoenixville High School were taking their mid-terms, so the students could be re-located there until the end of the school day. School is scheduled to resume as normal Thursday morning.

The water main failed originally sometime around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, Alston said the shutdown of water was between Norris and Russell Streets, but there were some additional problems.

“Once we shut the system down for those repairs, some customers also reported low pressure,” Alston said. “We have distribution people out there.”

Crews believed that the final fix would be completed sometime between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesday.

By 3 p.m., water was turned back on at Schuylkill Elementary and school is expected to be held Thursday morning, according to Sandy Claus, community relations coordinator for the Phoenixville Area School District, barring any overnight problems.

If such a problem would occur, the district would follow the normal channels of letting parents know school was cancelled.

Dave DiGirolamo, the assistant superintendent of the Aqua district where the main broke, said there was no collateral damage associated with the break.

“It’s confined to the main break itself,” he said. “Everything else was pretty much fine. We opened up the hole to make repairs, just where the main was.”

As such, damage to the roadway was minimal, he said.

The cause of the initial break in the cement and cast iron main hasn’t been fully determined, Alston said, but she speculated that the main’s age and the recent temperature swings had something to do with it.

In Pottstown, Yerger also isn’t sure why the Beech Street main keeps breaking, but age is a good candidate.

“It was laid in 1931 and it’s sitting on top of red shale,” said Yerger of the break, which is occurring between Keim Street and the Hill School tennis courts. “But there is a series of cracks that keep opening up. It’s highly unusual to see that kind of cracking in so many places in such a short period of time.”

The authority has $100,000 set aside in the 2013 budget for water line repairs, said Bob Plenderleith, Pottstown’s utilities administrator.

But the breaks are coming so fast and frequently that Yerger and authority engineer Tom Weld said the replacement of the pipe may need to be undertaken on an emergency basis, without going out to bid.

“I know it’s in our capital budget plan, but it would be nice to move it to the top of the list and get moving on it as soon as we can,” Yerger said.

The problem of crumbling infrastructure is not unique to Pottstown or Phoenixville.

“Southeastern Pennsylvania faces a looming water infrastructure crisis,” according to the First Suburbs Project of Southeastern Pennsylvania, a coalition of established communities which argues that suburbanization has drained resources from older towns, particularly in the areas of housing, education funding and physical infrastructure.

“ To repair and upgrade aging drinking water, wastewater and stormwater systems, and to deal with mounting regulatory challenges, our region will need to invest billions of dollars in water infrastructure in the coming years,” according to the site’s Infrastructure Action Group Report.

It is the group’s position that “future infrastructure investments should be guided by a ‘fix-it-first’ policy that prioritizes using and improving existing infrastructure before investing in new infrastructure.”

There are an estimated 240,000 water main breaks each year in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Aging Water Infrastructure Research Program, and some water experts fear that the problem is getting worse.

The water and sewer distribution systems in the U.S., “suffer from inadequate, outdated and/or neglected infrastructure,” according to EPA.

The agency has estimated that the nation’s drinking water systems require an investment of $334.8 billion over the next two decades, with most of the money needed to improve transmission and distribution systems.

In 2009, the New York Times reported that “with many systems showing their age, the American Water Works Association has termed this ‘the dawn of the replacement era.’ Many localities find themselves having to replace miles and miles of pipe for the first time — a burden that is especially acute in poorer, older industrial areas with shrinking populations, where such work would require higher-than-average water-rate increases on the residents who remain.”

Pottstown raised water rates in recent years to begin to set money aside for such capital projects without having to borrow money.